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Career advice for a young player
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bookaboo:
It's hard to give a holistic piece of advice without information such as what the opportunities are in your present company, what the opportunities elsewhere are etc. However why not build up your home lab and learn there too? I'm not saying that means stay necessarily but it might be a good compromise.
Also the grass may or may not be greener, do you think the small companies are going to cater to your needs? Or just give you the bottom tasks until you bootstrap your skills up, in fact for either choice.... self educate yourself and don't expect your employer to do it all.
rstofer:
It sounds like the OP is in a great position for the time being.  Might as well know now that engineering is more meetings than design.  Large projects will always be broken up into teams and teams need to coordinate.  You have the CPU hardware, CPU firmware, sensors and sensor drivers, actuators and actuator drivers, applications software and interface code, and so on.  On large projects, each of these might be a separate team with the applications team swearing they can't even start until everybody ahead of them is complete.  This type of thinking kills a project!

The key is to get people to make commitments for schedule and then track their performance to that schedule in periodic (weekly) meetings.  PUBLISH the schedule and make apparent those teams that are falling behind.  Drive the project to completion, don't just ride along.

Have fun with Gantt charts and PERT diagrams.  Microsoft Project can help with scheduling.  Schedule is everything!  A product that is late to market is usually dead on arrival - somebody else owns the market!

Team leaders are negotiators, not necessarily top level designers.  They have the unenviable task of trying to keep the top level folks on task.  "Whirly Birds" comes to mind.  It's a lot like herding cats!

In any event, everybody starts at the bottom and works up (except the genius folks) and the fact that the company is providing an internship to the OP is all good.  I would have a tendency to stay with the company after graduation.  The only caveat is that sometimes "the company that trains you doesn't pay you".  It's still about the money!  "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing for money!".

I spent most of my career as a project manager (pays better).  I bought engineering the same way I bought construction.  I was driving the train, not getting pulled along like a caboose.

jwet:
Definitely finish getting your degree!  It should be illegal for companies to offer starving student interns full time employment a year before they graduate.

Internships offer a learning opportunity.  What it sounds like you've learned is that there is lot of documentation requirements in the stuff you're doing or this company's approach.  These tasks tends to roll down hill as few enjoy it.  The value of an internship is seeing first hand what the job is, how people interact and who is having fun.  You won't get an opportunity like this ever again- take advantage, be nosey, be curious- get your grunt work finished and then wander around.  Not a lot is expected of interns and if you've nominally got your assignment finished, no one can fault you- you can even tell your supervisor that this is your intention.  Its a win win for everyone, you learn, they get their grunt work done for a fraction of an experienced engineer's wages and you learn.  Also, internships don't really count in job experience much- its basically part of schooling and you won't be judged if anyone even looks at it.

Get back to school, study hard, learn more about your specialty and have fun.  I think working for a big company is good to see how the big guys do things.  You might have already learned that.  You might want to look at a small division of Tier 1 in automotive or a Tier 2.  Automotive is nearly as paperwork intensive as miitary in general, the further you get from the OEM's, the less formal.
bookaboo:
I guess it's location dependent but where I'm based (Belfast) what should be illegal is the universities offering starving students "engineering" courses.   :(
Psi:
It can be annoying because the fun/actual electronic work tends to be stuff that every engineer at the company wants to do.
So the documentation and boring tasks all get offloaded to the new guy so the more experience engineers can "do the fun stuff".
So you only doing paperwork when starting out at the company is not all that unexpected.

You will find the smaller the company is the more real engineering work you get to do, especially when starting out.
It will be more fun but also usually more stressful as you will have more responsibility if stuff you made fails and costs the company money.  Ideally you want a smaller sized company but one that also has proper signoff and reviews of projects before they get released. Having another engineer to check your design and sign off on it is really good at caching mistakes you missed.
Badly run small companies tend to skip this. Where you design something and are asked to put it into production without anyone checking it. It's very high risk and i would avoid companies like that.

Smaller companies tend to pay less but not always. so it's a tradeoff.
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